Learning better discourse representation for implicit discourse relation recognition via attention networks

Humans comprehend the meanings and relations of discourses heavily relying on their semantic memory that encodes general knowledge about concepts and facts. Inspired by this, we propose a neural recognizer for implicit discourse relation analysis, which builds upon a semantic memory that stores knowledge in a distributed fashion. We refer to this recognizer as SeMDER. Starting from word embeddings of discourse arguments, SeMDER employs a shallow encoder to generate a distributed surface representation for a discourse. A semantic encoder with attention to the semantic memory matrix is further established over surface representations. It is able to retrieve a deep semantic meaning representation for the discourse from the memory. Using the surface and semantic representations as input, SeMDER finally predicts implicit discourse relations via a neural recognizer. Experiments on the benchmark data set show that SeMDER benefits from the semantic memory and achieves substantial improvements of 2.56% on average over current state-of-the-art baselines in terms of F1-score.